“When you got nothing, you got nothing to lose”

What am I clinging to? I’m a loser. I have nothing. I’m broke. I have no career prospects. I have lost my innocence, squandered my faith, used up all my hope. My health balances precariously between a healthy lifestyle on one end and self-destructive behaviors on the other. I have no control. My actions are prey to the whimsy of my fucked-up mind. My mind, my mind, my kingdom for a fucking stable mind. Oh, woe is me.

I want the truth. I want to be hurt. To feel pain again, to really feel the despair and hopelessness that I should be feeling. No more emptiness, no more retreating into my own reality in order to evade the harsher reality of the world. Reality, reality, fucking reality. You’re a bitch, you are. I’ve made it clear these past few years that I have no interest in dealing with you, and yet you keep hunting me down like the dog that I am. I can’t escape from you, now I realize, and one day I will be forced to face you, conquer you, and stand triumphant over you. I hope by then that I will be able to let go of all the bitterness, abuse, and emotional trauma you have caused me and save what little energy I have left to love and live in peace with myself and the world.

The truth, the truth. My kingdom for the truth. The truth is… the truth is that I’m an empty shell. There is nothing inside anymore. I’m a hollow tree trunk, impressive on the outside but with no roots or foundation. My leaves are trash, my bark is plastic, my seeds are poison. I’m a dead tree, going nowhere fast, my branches about to branch off into evolutionary death – just Nature separating the wheat from the chaff. Just a part of life. My life. Our life.

I’ve given up, and yet there is a little hope left, somewhere inside. I’m not sure where it is, only that it is present. It is the only good thing left inside me and must be nurtured. My hope is my only hope. The Bible says that the greatest of Faith, Hope, and Love is Love. I possess none of these 3 jewels, let alone the most important. Where does one go to find Faith, Hope, and Love. Are they nurtured from within? Are they decisions? Or are they handed down from the sky? From God himself?

What we achieve inwardly will change outer reality. – Plutarch

I criticize the gov’t for not making the right choices, the hard choices. and yet, I myself do not make the hard choices, the hard decisions. I don’t face the hard truths myself. Perhaps I find so much fault with the gov’t and society because I’m not at peace with myself and I really am projecting my self-hatred onto the world and our leaders. I have no hope or faith, therefore I expect others to act the same way, and thus I falsely believe that our nation is doomed. But there is hope yet, as the millions of honest, hard-working Americans can attest. I still believe in the power of the self and the individual, to change the world by changing himself, one person at a time. Perhaps the fault lies not with the world but with me, and I need to stop projecting all my negative feelings and thoughts unto the world.